Summary

We met at McMenamin's Edgefield in Portland, Oregon, September 12-13, 2006 to discuss build systems and release engineering around Europa (and Eclipse in general).

Our discussions gathered around the following four focii. We respectfully submit this report to the Planning Council for their consideration in Europa planning. Some of us have taken action items (recorded below) to improve the build and release process for Eclipse projects in general. This documentation is a recommendation by the group but not a commitment on behalf of any PMC.

Eclipse Build Best Practices

We have identified a number of release engineering best practices across eclipse.org projects.
This topic is about promoting these practices and providing tools to encourage standardized adoption of these practices. This is a good idea because we are replicating tools across projects and this wastes valuable committer time. We want to encourage these practices because the most successful projects employ a high level of automation to reduce the amount of human induced error.

Tooling to support versioning consistent with the eclipse standard Version_Numbering.

Track API changes - To see what has been added, changed or removed. Identify usage of internal APIs.

Action Items for BBP

20-Sep Max will update his GMF build documentation as an example of how to write it correctly and put the doc on the wiki; will send email on cross-project-issues-dev@eclipse.org; Ben will edit for native English. Content should include a contact person should there be problems with understanding the build.

1-Nov Projects will have followed Max's lead; prize drawing or something like a T-shirt will be given away to those who've participated. Max is the eligibility judge. Ben, Andrew, Hubert, John, u, Dave, o, Kim, i, Ted will help.

15-Oct Dave will ask a smaller project to provide their templates and Dave will write them up as a wiki page and solicit a vote from the cross-project-issues-dev@ list to the suitability of that result. Also ask EclipseCon 2007 to schedule a session around The Perfect Build.

31-Dec or earlier Hubert will make the feature dependancy tool open source. Hubert will find one other project to try out the tool. If that other project finds it useful, that project and Hubert will return with a recommendation that the tool be used more widely.

(15 September - Andrew, Ben) Finish Making Builds Reproducible page

September 25: (Kim with the assistance of Hubert and Dave) Post an initial list of the best practices from the workshop to the wiki; send an email to all committers and project leads asking them to submit their own best practices to the wiki

September 29 - (Kim, Hubert, Sue, and Jeff) Provide all existing versioning tools for download and evaluation. Each writes a wiki page on their tool; also evaluate the other three pages. The team of four will either agree on a best one for all Europa or they will return to the cross-projects-issues-dev@ list with a request for more discussion. Tell the Planning Council to promote the best tool for use within the Europa Release.

October 2: (Kim) Recommendation to all teams to use pack200 in their builds. (Send to planning council).

October 15 (Bjorn) Send an email to the committers@ asking them to get their nearby build engineers involved in this discussion.

RSS Feeds

The use of RSS feeds solves a number of issues in cross-project communication, and also open a door for cross-project build automation. It can serve as a tool for notification, and also as the input to builds which depend on updates to their upstream dependent projects.

This will ensure a consistent format for all downstream projects that may be listening for RSS build notifications.

All project build RSS notifications will be published to download.eclipse.org to minimize node replication and mirroring delays.

This will allow RSS listeners to wait for their most convenient mirror.

Project builds will publish an RSS feed entry for any build that may be of interest.

Feeds should include all types of builds (i.e. nightly, integration, maintenance, stable, release).

Feed updates should be published the same way projects currently publish builds; eg., if N builds are currently not published to download.eclipse.org, N build feeds are probably not necessary.

Feeds can be updated with changed build/test status as needed, so that responding to the notification of a new build need not be held up by long-running tests (eg., Eclipse platform)

It is up the RSS listener to determine what type of action should be taken depending upon the content of the RSS notification.

Action Items

Action items with dates and (where possible) individuals.

September 25: (Nick) Improve the already good spec on the wiki/web to a highly detailed spec, including restrictive vocabulary for build and test status. Send email (Cross Project Issues Dev mailing list) to the Europa build engineers and project leads of the Europa leads asking them for feedback before October 13.

October 20: (Nick) Declare the specification to be "mostly" frozen. Not withstanding continued incremental improvement, this is the RSS spec that all the projects will implement.

November 20: (All Europa projects) Have implemented publishing RSS information for their build, and provide a link on their website's homepage to that feed

Buckminster/Maven Build Enablement for BIRT and ECF

Background goes here on Buckminster/Maven and the corresponding Europa Workshop discussions (Build Best Practices and Common Build Infrastructure) that led to this initiative. What this is (Buckminster and Maven as a build technology). How Buckminster and Maven offered to help BIRT restructure their build. How ECF is the "small project" example. Why this is a good idea.

Introduction

The following organizations and individuals will be working on this Europa initiative to deliver complete build project migration for BIRT and ECF by March 3, 2007, based on agreed-upon requirements and milestones from this initiative.

Feature Requirements for BIRT

Support to handle versioning requirements: important to check timestamps in CVS and update versions accordingly in plug-ins and features that refer to such plug-ins (Buckminster can resolve this by adding action that checks (ant-task already present) and modifies)

Support to host required jar files currently stored in p4 from the Maven repo

Javadoc publication support via Maven plugin

Support to test components conditionally, e.g., if db2 is not installed, that test should not be enabled

Support for site.xml creation

Support for existing BIRT project email build notification functionality (build failures and test output sent as emails to developers)

Platform/environment-independent support for the BIRT build

Feature Requirements for ECF

Adding plug-in and/or feature sets to the build needs to be such that any ECF team member can master it with an hour or two of training and be able to add project elements to the build in one hour, or less.

Support for both local file and remote CVS source and binary code fetch for builds.

Report ECF build results to all ECF team members via email.

Support for running JUnit plugin tests with test result reporting all ECF team members via email.

Automated run of "nightly" builds at pre-defined build times.

Support for user-initiated builds via web dashboard.

Build administration, which is simple to master; such that any ECF team member can quickly learn "how to."

Be able to select output ECF builds following the five Eclipse Foundation build type formats:

Releases: Releases are builds that have been declared major releases by the ECF development team - for example "R1.0". Releases are the right builds for people who want to be on a stable, tested release, and don't need the latest greatest features and improvements. Release builds always have an "R" at the beginning of the name i.e. R1.0, R2.0 etc. Non-release builds are named according to the date of the build - for example 20050710 is the build from July 10, 2005.

Stable Builds: Stable builds are integration builds that have been found to be stable enough for most people to use. They are promoted from integration build to stable build by the architecture team after they have been used for a few days and deemed reasonably stable. The latest stable build is the right build for people who want to stay up to date with what is going on in the latest development stream, and don't mind putting up with a few problems in order to get the latest greatest features and bug fixes. The latest stable build is the one the development team likes people to be using, because of the valuable and timely feedback.

Integration Builds: Periodically, component teams version off their work in what they believe is a stable, consistent state, and they update the build configuration to indicate that the next integration build should take this version of the component. Integration builds are built from these stable component versions that have been specified by each component team as the best version available. Integration builds may be promoted to stable builds after a few days of testing. Integration builds are built whenever new stable component versions are released into the build.

Nightly Builds: Nightly builds are produced over night from whatever has been released into the HEAD stream of the CVS repository. They are completely untested and will almost always have major problems. Many will not work at all. These drops are normally only useful to developers actually working on the ECF project.

Note: Nightly builds are produced only as requested, and not necessarily every night, by developers to build what was in HEAD.

Maintenance Builds: Periodically builds for maintenance of the current release will be performed. They will not necessarily be stable builds. When the maintenace is finalized and released, it will be moved up to a Release build. If the build name starts with an "M" i.e. M200500810,then it has not been tested for stability. If it is a release candidate, i.e. 0.5.0.1RC1, then it is a stable maintenance build.

Common Build Infrastructure

Introduction

A common build infrastructure encompasses a build farm, a tool for build management, and a "dashboard"-esque tool for post-build investigation.

We believe that an 80/20 rule can be applied here: we can easily and quickly meet the needs of 80% of the projects out there with a simple, common build setup. Functionality can be built up to satisfy the remaining projects with "special needs" (ie. native code).

In an ideal world, all projects would make use of this infrastructure. In the real world, we realize that teams will continue to make use of their existing infrastructure.

Benefits

This common infrastructure will augment project facilities and act as a second build environment available for use.

This infrastructure can be used by both new projects to ease their startup pain and also by existing projects to standardize build procedures and to take away maintenance costs.

Consistency: builds will be reproducible and auditable due to consistent practices

Best practices: build best practices are more easy to enforce when build procedures are transparent and consistent

Outreach: this can be considered an outreach activity to a certain extent. Increased transparency is not a bad thing :)

Committers and projects need not worry about so much setup/infrastructure

Components

Build farm

ie. build.eclipse.org.

Longer term, this may grow to include architectures and operating systems used by projects with native code. This growth will be managed by the needs of projects and provided by the foundation.

Build management tool

EMFT currently has an exemplary tool for customizing and starting builds. Here is a screenshot:

Action Items for CBI

(15 October - Nick, Andrew) Assist in migrating ECF to web UI for kicking builds & running tests on their vserver using EMFT as example

(1 November - Andrew) Work on proposal for Foundation including what we intend recommendations will entail

(1 November - Denis, Henrik, Sue) Set up a vserver for Buckminster/BIRT builds. Denis estimates that if we end up going with vservers, this will cost $750/project (in increments of 6); Denis will ask for money if that route is chosen. Predicted alternative: set this up on build.eclipse.org and don't have vservers.

(1 December - Henrik, Sue, Nick, Denis, Andrew) Report on past few months' work to determine what is required of the foundation for the future

(15 December) Based upon report, propose required resources to foundation including the following recommendations:

(Potential) Recommendations

staff at eclipse.org to maintain infrastructure (both IT and UI)

staff at eclipse.org to manage releng of release train

member companies must provide a small (2-4 people total) team of rotating releng people to manage release train

build infrastructure hardware at eclipse.org

Communication Channels

For Europa, there needs to be at least one designated contact from each project available via phone, email, IM, etc. For critical periods (milestones and release candidates), the Europa build engineers should be on a common IRC channel or IMs or something.